§ 156
All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part, huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each other’s feet.
If one should ask if sex is the sole or major motive in all this the answer would be, by no means, if physical sex is all that is meant. The need is for companionship which many followers of crowds, not having the companionship furnished by the complete love of a man or a woman, fancy they get from the sight or elbow-touch of masses of people.
The deeply, profoundly, thoroughly married couples are the only ones who have no need to fear anything that comes from incompleteness. They neither crave nor are averse to other people, but the most fully mated never appreciate crowds very highly. Into their own mystic circle of binary personality they cannot take a third.
For these thirds there is no hope but to find each his or her own complementary personality. The women wait; for there is nothing else to do. They cannot find by looking; they can only give themselves the gaunt consolation of distracting their own attention from love until they are found by the proper men.
For in spite of the great popularity which George Bernard Shaw gives to his ideas by putting them in epigrammatic and striking literary form, the truth is manifest to all who think straightforwardly and do not believe in a statement simply because it is paradoxical and therefore emphatic—the truth, namely, that women are not the choosers but if there is any choice they are the chosen, and are themselves utterly helpless and must remain inactive.
They can try to attract men but the more they try, the more will the erotically developed men unconsciously and unerringly infer that there is some weakness about them that necessitates this strenuous attempt to compensate for it. The harder they try to attract men, the more suspicious do the men become, particularly those having any deep acumen. As for the men being simply the helpless puppets of a sex of sirens—it is ridiculous.
The world is made up of the unmarried, the truly mated and those ill-assorted thirds whom ignorance has left unhappy and helpless until knowledge comes to the male partner.